Quick tips how you can win more business and get more done next quarter

As quarter 3 comes to an end, you’re probably wondering how you can win more business and get more done for the final quarter. In my latest blog I’m sharing some tips on how you can win more business and get more done next quarter.

End of March is approaching very soon and you are probably ready for your Easter egg hunt in some way, which also means the end of the first quarter for 2018. For many businesses, this means there is only one quarter left to finish the financial year successfully and meet the set targets.

Starting the quarter with more accurate targets, better processes and new insights is a recipe for success. Here are a couple of things you can do to win more business and get more done in the next and last quarter of 2018.

Review your Sales Targets

Now is the time to review how well you did in 2018 so far, compared to your predictions. Dig into what worked, what didn’t work and try to understand why.

What were your sales targets? Did you meet them? Why not? Were the targets unrealistic? Are you understaffed? Is there a bottleneck in the process that’s making it difficult for your sales team to hit their targets? What feedback are you getting about why they can’t reach their targets? What can you do with that information?

Make sure to work with your team to establish targets together and suggest ways of improving processes.

Review Your Customer Journey

The customer journey is the process that someone goes through as they transition from a prospect, to lead, to a customer to repeat business and referrals. It includes your Facebook ads a prospect might see, emails you send to a lead, phone calls and meetings you have with a customer. Every time someone interacts with your business, they are somewhere along the customer journey.

Why drawing a customer journey map? Mapping out the journey is an essential part of understanding the process your customers go through and helps you identify the pitfalls, so you can overcome them and win more business. It will show each individual customer’s progress through the journey.

Customer journey and experience mapping is an art and can be a full project by itself.

But, it shouldn’t be holding you back from getting started. So, why not start by drawing the sequential steps of the customer decision process.

First, write down all the different points a customer may interact with you – your Customer touch points. Think about how they may find you. Review ads, your website, how you respond to social media and social media pages, as well as if you there are any online reviews. Then, have a look at how a customer interacts with your sales team. How many emails do you send? When do you initiate a phone call or a face to face meeting? How do you follow-up with your clients to keep up good relations for the future?

Secondly, describe every task or action that your customer-facing employee needs to complete to help a customer advance to the next decision stage.

After that, Identify the milestones along the journey and mark them as the journey stages for your journey map. Milestones are the key decisions your customer made, and at the same time they are the internal milestones for your employees. It provides insights where each customer currently is in the decision

By drawing your basic operational customer journey map, the CRM sales pipeline will be mapped out for you, combined with the key tasks and all customer touchpoints along the way.

In a CRM, all this data can be mapped to the customer account and contact data, providing you with a single view of the customer, while supporting you with further customer journey analytics and customer insights.

Evaluate if it makes sense for your business to build a customer journey within the CRM system, that will guide your people through the sequential steps of the customer decision process.

Review how you could improve for the next quarter and use the journey maps to make a better experience for your customers.

Even the simplest CRM system will support you to configure a basic customer journey, and provide you with a basic sales pipeline template – that can be modified according to your process.

Don’t forget your employees

We all tend to focus so rigidly on customer acquisition and customer experience, that the employee experience is often compromised somewhere along the way. We tend to forget to ask them for their regular feedback.

Forrester’s research has proven that companies that are making the most gains in customer experience are investing in employee-facing technologies to do it with. They realise that customer experience is in their employees’ hands. For this single reason, a quality CRM software might as well be called an employee relations management system!

Give your team an outlet to express themselves. Maybe start sending out surveys to get anonymous feedback from your employees. Consider negative feedback as an opportunity to make positive changes for your business and make your team more productive and happy.

Once you start to apply improvements to the way the CRM helps your employees to do their job, you’ll see your employees adopting much better to the CRM technology and start to notice their enthusiasm and involvement for new initiatives.

Refresh Your Email Campaigns

The beauty of email marketing is that you can send a consistent message to many people in your contact database. But, when was the last time you reviewed these emails?

For many small businesses, email marketing is the primary way to nurture new leads. These emails are often the first steps in reaching out and converting customers, but often they aren’t utilised very well, nor followed up in a timely manner.

You’d be surprised how much things can change over a year and you could be losing out on new opportunities. Set some time to review all the emails you send your customers and make sure that all the information is still up to date.

Look for things that may mis-inform your leads, undersell what services you provide or even prevent them from contacting you. With a new look at your email campaigns, you can start fresh and be confident that you’re putting your best foot forward and doing your best to win more business.

Look for ways to personalise your communications with customers to increase sales. Such as, starting emails with a personal greeting and personalised email content.

Bring in an Expert

Staying in a dynamic business that is ready to overcome new challenges is hard because, over time, we build up systems that, while initially well designed and intended, blind us to new opportunities. These processes, procedures, thoughts, and methods start to become second nature, and you can forget the reasons you started doing something in the first place. The longer you do it, the less you question it and just assume it is right.

But what if these processes are not the best way to do things? Or what if they worked five years ago but as the times have changed, are no longer as effective? How do you identify these problems? Sometimes, you bring in outside perspective that’s skilled in helping businesses scale.

When your growth has stalled or is declining, or you’re not growing fast enough, getting outside help might be the thing that you need to help push you to your next level. While a consultant, business coach, or expert might not have the expertise in your field, they are experts in strategic planning. They can help remove these blind spots by asking you to question your assumptions, have you challenge your current processes and suggest tools that help you make better decisions.

Are you looking to win more business and get more done?

Consider whether bringing in an expert to get you started with CRM, or improve the way you could be using your CRM system.